When you disconnect the people from these objects—say, during the Potlatch Ban—and you disallow them to speak their language and to have contact with their children, thereʼs this huge displacement. Itʼs kind of like a baby being taken away and fostered into a different home, nowadays. They are displaced from all of that cultural knowledge, the values, the beliefs. When you then ask that person, “Who are you?,” I think they often have a feeling not just of grief and loss, but simply of the guilt and shame of not knowing. But because we know that these things are objects, we donʼt have quite that same dichotomy going on. Instead, weʼre left with questions like, why couldnʼt we get those items back? Or, why wasnʼt my whole life based on trying to understand what they meant?

In Native communities, we are still suffering the effects and trauma of contact. But many of us are very well fed, very well slept, and have a lot of access, a lot of privilege. What you choose to do with that affects how much knowledge you can retain—certainly about these objects. Grief, loss, shame, and guilt aside, when I look at these old pieces, I see craftsmanship. I see them as tools, and I have curiosity about what tools the carvers could have used to make them. I see a people of industry. I see a people who were bent on legacy. I see intentional objects. I see a system of organizing information, dates, people, story. And underlying everything is this belief in the equality of human beings with their environment and with the spirit world.

I look at the complexity of the displacement and locate it, so that Iʼm not so daunted by not knowing—and by the task of trying to find out more. Now we have the immediacy of trying to still figure out what the form and function of each object was and is. Itʼs an emergency, right? Iʼm sure many people are curious and enthusiastic about just simply knowing. Itʼs about actually connecting these things to our social networks again—to people.